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New Scientist Live

Can the coelacanth be saved?

By Debora Mackenzie

WILL the World Bank come to the rescue of a fish described as a “living fossil”? Next month it will consider a plan to improve the lot of local fishermen around the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean so that they leave the coelacanth in peace to build up its numbers.

The coelacanth’s limb-like pectoral fins make it the only known survivor from the era when vertebrates began to evolve into land-dwellers. Once thought to be extinct, it was rediscovered in 1938 off the Comoros Islands. Although now a protected species it is hurtling towards extinction.

Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology near Munich says Comoros fishermen are driving the species to the brink. An aid project funded by the European Community in 1989 replaced their canoes with motorboats, helping them to quadruple their catches. But now, says Fricke, all the motors are dead, and the fishermen are trying to maintain their catches by overfishing close to the shore where the coelacanths live. They inadvertently snag coelacanths on their lines, and kill them.

Fricke’s team, which has been studying the fish from a submarine since 1987, counted only a third as many coelacanths in one area last December as it did in 1989. Many individual fish identified by the team have disappeared. “We know from radio tags that these fish do not migrate,” he says. “They are dying off. Worse, we see no young fish.” The coelacanth bears live young, which makes the species especially vulnerable if pregnant females are caught.

Next month, enviromnental officers of the World Bank will propose a project to save the coelacanth. The plan is to improve fisheries near the shore, but outside the range of the coelacanth, and to install underwater cameras near the caves where the coelacanths live, making the fish a tourist attraction. “It would cost less than &dollar;1 million to set up,” says Fricke. He says the coelacanth is a relic of our evolutionary past that must be preserved.